Any Number of Daze

November 5, 2002

By Emerson Schwartzkopf

With the holidays approaching, most children begin hinting pretty hard their choices for gifts, as if television ads won’t do much of the sales job on parents anyway. I didn’t go through the same ritual all those many years ago, though; my mother knew my favorite wish.
And, right on time, I got that special item I’d spend hours – no, days – with as the year rolled by: A fresh new edition of The World Almanac®.
OK, so I was a strange child. For years, I’d pore over details on the world’s longest cantilever bridge (with a 1,710’ span, it soars over the Firth of Forth in Scotland), the state motto of Tennessee (“Agriculture & Commerce”) and the coldest recorded temperature in the 48 contiguous states (-70°F at Rogers Pass, Mont.). I couldn’t get enough of it.
Knowing all these facts and figures didn’t exactly make me the king of the playground, although I made everyone’s A-list for parties later in my life during the Trivial Pursuit® craze. Storing all this information in my head meant I had two career paths in life: becoming the first human Internet server, or working as an editor.
This early and passionate devotion to arcane knowledge came up again when I started to look at the data for dimensional stone shipped into the United States. Suddenly, I found numbers. Lots of numbers. Numbers that could tell all sorts of great stories.
Do all these numbers, though, really mean anything to the average fabricator or installer or stone-care pro, let alone the designers, engineers and anyone else but the importers? Absolutely … but all of them aren’t equal.
Tackling the raw data involves an introduction to the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) and its various intricacies. It also means delving into some 50 different reports on tonnage and value of imports, which can be a marvelous exercise in working with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and a good argument for buckling down and learning macros.
Even this tells you more than you’d ever want to know about stone. Something like “Did you know Croatia exported exactly one metric ton of granite to the States last year?” is pretty dull for a conversation starter, whether it’s in an elevator or next to a gang saw. And I can’t tell you where the 38 metric tons of marble and travertine came from in Monaco last year, and I’ll wager Prince Albert wouldn’t know, either.
Mix in all those number, however, and thousands of bits of arcane data show one clear notion: As everything else crumbles, stone is still going strong.
Take this July, for example, which is the month with the most-recent data on imports. Granite imports, measured by weight, totaled 37-percent-more than July 2001. Marble and travertine imports by weight combined, meanwhile, also came in during July at an increase of nearly 25 percent than the year before.
The value of those metric tons, though, is a different story during the past year. The net result is less money flowing back to producing countries, and competitive prices here for materials. For users – from designers to fabricators to customers – it’s a prosperous time.
It’s been that way for several years. The mineral commodities summary from dimensional-stone specialist Thomas Dolley at the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) this year shows consumption of imported stone rising dramatically – from a value of $548 million in 1997 to an estimated $1 billion last year. Add up the value of all dimensional stone consumed in 2001, and four out of every five dollars went for an imported product.
Reliance on foreign imports for stone is nothing new, however. A USGS study showed the first year that imports exceeded domestic-stone production, by weight, was 1982. By 1986, imports began edging U.S. stone by a 2-to-1 margin, and the gap’s continued to widen.
Those numbers also contain a thought to consider; just because the stone trade is bucking the downward trend in the national economy, we’re not immune to economic problems.
Up-and-down foreign-exchange rates can affect imported-stone costs, and currency trading isn’t as freewheeling as stone. Comparing the Chinese yuan to the Brazilian real sounds pretty pedantic, until you’re on the receiving end of a container or two of granite.
Don’t look at all those import numbers as, well, just numbers. As more fabricators become spot-job importers and more people offer more stone from more places on the globe, import reports offer a better understanding of what lies ahead.
I’ll keep an eye on those numbers as well. Of course, that’ll mean a little less time with the World Almanac, and I know my spouse has that 2003 edition hidden with the other gifts somewhere in the house ….